Re: book downloads, copyright protection
This may be of general interest, tho' not Iomega specific. It may be relevant to whether zips have potential as 'catchers' mitts' for copyrighted material.
In October I attended a workshop at the National Institute of Standards & Technology, aka NIST (Maryland), organized to encourage developers of "E-books" to work on open standards which would 'grow' such an industry. There are a number of issues to be worked out: copyright, means of display, portability, etc. Many attendees were from companies developing portable, laptop-like, dedicated reading devices. A question in my mind is, will people want to use such devices or will they prefer to download to their computers. I tried out the one working example I saw, and it was not unpleasant to use, tho' I'm not sure how it would feel over a long period; and it was almost as heavy as a laptop. IBM was there with their eensy 300MB(?) hard disk, a bit thicker than a credit card. I saw no other vendors of storage media.
There was too much to cover here; the URL of the conference, which leads to the conf. program and URLs for attendees, is
nist.gov
cheers
Eve |
